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Piirainen 1 Reconsidering Liedertheorie: How German Nationalism Affected Beowulf Scholarship in 18th and 19th Century Europe By Natasha Piirainen, Class of 2014 Department of English, Wheaton College Thesis Adviser: Professor Drout, Professor of English Defense Committee: In-Department Reader: Professor Coale, Professor of English Outside-Department Reader: Professor Partridge, Professor of Philosophy Piirainen 2 Table of Contents: Introduction: German Nationalism and Beowulf Scholarship, a.k.a. it’s Complicated P. 3 Chapter One: Brief Recap of German History, or Why the Germans are so Grumpy P. 8 Chapter Two: Biased Medieval Scholars, a.k.a. Give Mullenhoff a Break P. 23 Chapter Three: 21st Century Liedertheorie, a.k.a. Trust Me, I’m a Dendrogram! P. 53 Conclusion: Don’t be so Critical when being Critical P. 94 Piirainen 3 Introduction: German Nationalism and Beowulf Scholarship, a.k.a. it’s Complicated I have a love/hate relationship with Beowulf and, as it turns out, so did 19th century German scholars (but that will come later on). In high school I was told Beowulf originated as an Old English oral tradition that was told among families and friends as a form of entertainment during the dreary and plague-ridden “Dark Ages”, but college taught me, among other things, that my high school Beowulf lessons were nothing more than vastly oversimplified versions of the truth, that nobody actually knows anything conclusive about the poem’s origins and that scholars never refer to the medieval period as the “Dark Ages”. Medieval scholarship suffers from a unique problem: because the subject matter is both literary and historical, post-modern and post-post-modern interpretations of poems with unknown origins like Beowulf may be interesting, but they do not assist in expanding our knowledge of the text. Very few medieval texts exist in their full, undestroyed format. Many of them are fragmented, like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; others are known about but lost like The Finnsburg Fragment; still others were destroyed by fires or the overall mistreatment of manuscripts like the Cotton Library fire, which burned hundreds of medieval manuscripts. Not only are many manuscripts damaged or destroyed, but they are also written in older versions of modern languages, some of which are not fully understood or translatable into modern English. There are words in Old English that appear only one time in the entire corpus. Scribal errors turn proper nouns into incomprehensible word-jumbles, and not everything written down, even in supposedly historical medieval documents, seems to be accurate: take, for instance, The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, which includes at least two separate dragon sightings. Medieval Piirainen 4 literary scholarship is therefore limited, both by the small number of accessible texts and the small quantity of trustworthy historical evidence. Beowulf is certainly a victim of medieval-uniqueness, as the manuscript seems to have been abused over the past thousand years or so. The text actually disappeared from literary history after the 1100s and did not return until around the 1500s. Nobody knows what happened to the original text, and the only remaining manuscript was transcribed by two people, A and B, who presumably were not as familiar with the Old English used in the old manuscript as they were with the Old English they spoke, a result of the language evolving over time. Within the text they have created a large number of apparent spelling errors, sometimes an accidental consequence of the scribe trying to “fix” the poem so it matched his more modern Old English. They also misspelled many of the proper names, more evidence pointing to their unfamiliarity with the older version of their language. To confuse matters even more, scribe A only finished about half of the text, so scribe B went back and corrected parts of A’s translation. Later on the manuscript caught fire, causing many words to disappear because of burns and subsequent crumbling. Edges of pages have fallen off due to wear and tear and the fragility of the paper. Bookworms have left holes in the paper, as they chewed through parts of the book. Pages have been partially destroyed, blotted out, and there are some passages that were left unreadable. Scholars have no way of knowing how much of the poem has been lost due to the destruction of the only surviving manuscript. We also do not know when the original Beowulf story was created. A popular theory is that it started out as oral tradition, but even so, scholars are unable to pinpoint an exact date of when this might have happened. The closest we have come is between Piirainen 5 the year 1000, which is when the two scribes were copying the manuscript we have today, and the year 525, because of historical dated events mentioned in the poem with enough detail to imply that the poet knew about the events on a historical level, such as the legendary 6th century Swedish Wars. We are left with a text that has an unknown author, an unknown date, and an unknown origin. All of these unknowns, of course, are opportunities for medieval scholarship to push the boundaries of literary and historical analysis in an effort to discover something conclusive about the Beowulf poem. The poem has always been used in an opportunistic way, ever since its resurgence into the public sphere in the 1700s. The Danes wanted to claim it as their own, taking away England’s ownership of the old epic, a task that would be given to a somewhat incompetent scholar who, as will be noted later on in Chapter 2, was never even able to understand the Old English he attempted to translate. The Danes had started a trend, and soon other countries wanted to claim Beowulf as their own, a goal picked up enthusiastically by the Germans, who at the time were a group of people living across Europe without a country to call their own. The logic was that if somebody could prove the poem was actually German in origin, then it would also prove that they were a historical group of people with a long-lasting culture worthy of being their own sovereign nation. Because of this nationalist bias that appears in much of German medieval scholarship during the 18th and 19th centuries, modern scholars have written off much of their work based on the idea that it is too biased to be helpful to our analysis of the poem. Writing off an entire century or more of medieval scholarship, however, is more harmful than trying to wade through the nationalistic biases that we scholars find so disconcerting. Without the technology available to us today and without the in-depth Piirainen 6 understanding of proper translations of the poem into our modern language, the German philologists were nevertheless able to uncover facts about the poem that we now take for granted. They were able to parse through the two separate Beowulfs who appear in the poem and recognized that the first Beowulf mentioned was in no way related to the second Beowulf, who acts as the hero of the story. They untangled the messy manuscript, despite the complicated and dated grammar that appears in the text, with much credit going to philological geniuses, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. To ignore or dismiss the German’s early scholarship not only takes credit away from where credit is due but also may cause scholars to waste time rediscovering something that has long ago been discovered. My Beowulf research, using the lexomics program in particular, has paralleled literary analysis done by German scholar, Karl Mullenhoff, which will be explored in depth in chapters 2 and 3. Mullenhoff is now infamous for his outrageous desire to make his homeland, a swamp region in the Ditmarsch of Holstein, the origin of the Beowulf poem. He encouraged medieval scholars of his time period to use an analytical technique known as Liedertheorie, which consisted of finding distinct lays or sections of a poem that are not original to the piece but were added later either by the same poet or by someone else. He therefore broke Beowulf up into separate lays, noting shifts in not only plot but also narrative style and poetic structure. He used a Liedertheorie lens to explain why there were plot, style, and structural contradictions in the Old English epic. Because of his harsh demeanor and unwavering dismissal of any analysis not done through Liedertheorie, Mullenhoff’s work was largely forgotten after his death in 1884. People were so turned off by his angry nature and overall mean-spirited criticism Piirainen 7 that once he was gone and no longer able to defend his own scholarship, it was abandoned, eventually acquiring a reputation of being outrageously unreasonable. Using a computer program surely lacking any type of nationalistic bias, modern scholarship has also created a fragmented version of Beowulf where different shifts in the poem’s style seem to suggest heterogeneous text. The dendrograms I created using the lexomics program suggest that perhaps Mullenhoff’s Liedertheorie was not so crazy after all. I plan to use Liedertheorie in an unbiased context in order to understand the potential benefits modern scholars can gain from applying this theory to Beowulf. Using dendrograms from my previous lexomics research, textual evidence, and a slight modification of the definition of what constitutes Liedertheorie, I will show that Mullenhoff’s ideas, while nationalistically biased, were closer to the truth than often credited. Liedertheorie as an analytical tool is not outdated or outrageous but instead can provide enlightening interpretations of different texts, especially medieval poems that we know little about historically.

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